It’s really sad how many Americans put stock in their so-called “Democracy.” First, it’s controlled from the beginning by the corrupt two party system, then there’s a layer of voter suppression, filtered through the electoral college (more voter suppression) and a huge cloud of lies and media.
Most of us have heard of Nixon’s scuttling of the Vietnam peace talks [politico]:
Anna Chennault, a Republican activist with ties to the South Vietnamese government, sent word to Saigon that it would get better terms if Humphrey lost and Nixon took office, the FBI would discover. The South Vietnamese dragged their feet, infuriating LBJ who, in a taped conversation released by the Johnson presidential library several years ago, can be heard denouncing Nixon for “treason.”
What a sneaky ratfuck. Perhaps that’s why Roger Stone was inspired to have Nixon’s face tattooed on his back. That is such a creepy thing, but what else should we expect from such a creepy guy? Anyhow, the fact that most of the US chose to overlook about that incident is that a bunch more Vietnamese (and some imperial stormtroopers) were killed in interval of the delay. But, hey, bygones be bygones:
Neither side wanted to push the issue. “I think there was an implicit understanding between two very politically sophisticated people, who had been in the arena for a very long time, to say ‘Hey, look, this thing is over, you know, neither one of us are going to gain anything by stirring up this pot,’” Huston says.
That’s politician for “that worked, so we can expect it to happen again, or maybe it’ll be us doing it next time.”
So, next time looked like:
If you look on the left side-bar, you can see the special section about the Reagan Inauguration. Reagan beat Carter, because Carter did not do a good enough job (The American People believed) of handling the hostage crisis. Note that the US embassy in Iran was a hotbed of CIA spies for a long time before Carter came into office, and Carter inherited a great big, stinking, mess regarding US/Iran policy. Khomeini did not trust the US because, among other things, he had operated as a paid CIA rabble-rouser prior to getting involved in politics as a figure in his own right. In other words, he knew the US’ methods and was on the lookout.
So, Carter had this situation with an embassy full of hostages held by Iranian “dissidents and students” who the Iranians were claiming were CIA spies, and the US was trying to pretend that they were not CIA spies even though they were. Carter attempted a military option to recover the hostages, which failed spectacularly and got a bunch of people killed. There is no evidence that that effort was sabotaged in an attempt to make Carter look bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that, someday, too.
But [kos]
The plot was simple enough. [Texas Governor] Connally and Barnes traveled “to one Middle Eastern capital after another” over the summer of 1980, as U.S. hostages were being held in Tehran. On every one of those stops, they passed along the same message for the new leadership in Iran: Don’t make a deal with Carter. Wait for Reagan. He’ll give you a much better deal.
When they arrived back in the United States, Connolly checked in with Reagan’s campaign chair, and future Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey. For his role in “torpedoing” Carter’s chance at reelection, Connolly hoped to be rewarded with the job of Secretary of State. He was not.
I bet that any surviving hostages will be duly grateful for their opportunity to enjoy their stay in Iran, extended by Governor Connally.
Midjourney AI and mjr: “roger stone’s back with ronald reagan tattoo instead of richard nixon”
Carter is still seen as “a nice guy, but a fairly ineffective president” because of the hostage crisis and the OPEC oil embargo that drove gas prices up in the 1970s. [us state dept] Another self-inflicted wound. I wonder if there were republican operatives meeting with OPEC members to screw the Carter administration, too.
It’s ratfucks all the way down, people. I do not believe it is possible to be too cynical about US politics.
Yes, that is a pretty bad likeness of Reagan. But Roger’s ink is shitty and Nixon doesn’t look great, either. You’d think he could have hit Tricky Dick up for a few thousand bucks to have a good artist do the inkwork.
I tried to get a Midjourney AI illustration for this, of Roger Stone’s back looking like Mt Rushmore with Nixon, Reagan, and Bush tattoos on it, but Midjourney’s stupid anti-nudity filters kept flagging it. I have Stable Diffusion set up on my gaming computer and I have fun with that, as well – it’s got a very different way of “seeing”. I generally like the results better:
Stable Diffusion and mjr: “roger stone’s tattoo of ronald reagan”
Actually, looks like John Connally.
That preempts the comment I was going to make.
Makes you wonder what ratfucks are going on nowadays that won’t be revealed for 40-50 years, of course I’ll be beyond caring by then anyway. Tattoo actually looks more like Don Regan than Ron Reagan (or even Connally).
crivitz@#3:
Makes you wonder what ratfucks are going on nowadays that won’t be revealed for 40-50 years, of course I’ll be beyond caring by then anyway.
Bigger than overthrowing the government and replacing it with a congressional oligarchy? Do they get any bigger than that?
Like dad the history professor always said – the truth of a time starts to come clear in 50yr when the bodies are mostly buried.
Reading this makes me think of the way peace in Northern Ireland had to wait until Blair got elected…
Apparently, the problem is that when you heard someone say “democracy,” you mistakenly got the impression that they had said “the US political system.” That sounds like your problem, not theirs.
It is helpful to remember that the democracy envisioned by the founders of our countries does not match closely with the idea that we all have of what it should mean. Our founders were hypocrites on a grand scale – they talked loftily of self-evident truths and creator-granted universal rights – yet held other human beings as property to be used and traded. They did not percieve a contradiction in this, because they expected to be talking to an audience of other white, male, rich, property-and-people owners. No other audience mattered.
In the united states, a revolution allegedly sparked by unrepresentative taxation was, after its success, supported by unrepresentative taxation on other groups. Rebellions against this (see: Whiskey Rebellion) were swiftly put down. Again – no contradiction was percieved by the founders. They knew that the audience they cared about, an audience much like themselves, would understand that rhetoric about universal rights, due process, and the like was solely that. Rhetoric. These grand ideals were never meant to be universalized, and the country functioned just fine being ruled by a wealthy aristocratic class governing in it’s own interests. The systems that were set up understood that all the talk about ‘free speech’, ‘freedom of assembly’, ‘right to bear arms’, ‘due process of law’, etc – were only ever intended to apply to wealthy white men. All other groups could be oppressed by the mechanisms of the state without limit. See also: convict leasing, black laws, the history of gun control, the sedition act, etc.
I think that the only thing that caused the US (and us Canadians on your coat tails) to become, temporarily, something close to actual democracies was the soviet union. For a brief period of time, the US thought that it needed to win over the nations of the third world and it’s own subject peoples by pretending to be *better* than the authoritarian and brutal soviet union. The US needed to pretend to adhere to its stated values, lest the darned ruskies use the clear discrimination and inequality of the reality of the US’s means of functioning as a weapon to convert the ‘third world’ and cause unrest within the US itself.
Now that the US’s international rivals no longer feel the need to compete with the US on moral grounds – China, Russia and India are all run by regressive racist xenophobes – the US’s central reactionary powerbase can finally relax it’s gut – it can let out a long-held breath and start hurting the people that it always wanted to hurt. Disenfranchise the blacks, indians and other racial minorities. Pack the courts with reactionaries who understand the ways that the laws were always intended to be ‘enforced’ – harsh against minorites and the poor, lenient against the rich. Push the gays back into the closet. Execute the trans and other ‘deviants’. Whip up the traditional jew-hate that european aristocrats used from time immemorial to distract the populace from the hands in their pockets.
This is just a system returning to the mean – nothing new at all. Without an international competition on a moral dimension, the US can return to the happy hypocrisy it was founded upon.